Virtual machines (VMs), may be executed by a group, or “cluster,” of host computing devices (“hosts”). Each VM creates an abstraction of physical computing resources, such as a processor and memory, of the host executing the VM and executes a “guest” operating system, which, in turn, executes one or more software applications. The abstracted resources may be functionally indistinguishable from the underlying physical resources to the guest operating system and software applications. Supporting technology referred to as “live migration” can move running VMs between hosts in Me cluster; and is available as VMware vSphere® vMotion® from VMware Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif. In addition, cluster virtualization management software can determine initial and ongoing locations of VMs on hosts within the cluster and can manage the allocation of cluster computing resources. An example of cluster virtualization management software is referred to as Distributed Resource Scheduler™, a feature of VMware vSphere®, also by VMware, Inc. In addition, high availability (hereinafter referred to as “HA”) provides features that monitor VMs to detect guest system and hardware failures, potentially restarting the VMs on other hosts in the cluster without manual intervention when a failure is detected. High Availability is another feature of VMware vSphere™ by VMware, Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif.
HA is a top priority for critical applications in any enterprise or business. However, conventional HA clustering technology has limitations with respect to VM availability. For example, when a management network failure occurs for a subset of the cluster's hosts, these partitioned hosts might be unable to communicate over the management network with the other hosts in the cluster. In addition, one of the hosts in a network partition may lose VM network connectivity, which causes that particular host to become network isolated with all other hosts within a network portioned host. This results in network access for all the VMs running in that particular host getting lost, which further results in permanent access loss for that particular VM to a user or customer until at least the VM network connectivity is manually fixed for the respective host.